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Nick Gillespie

Four awful reactions to the Sandy Hook school shootings

Beyond all questions of politics is a more basic question of efficacy. What exactly might be done to prevent mass shootings, especially at locations such as schools? In the wake of the Giffords shooting by Jared Lee Loughner, there were many calls for institutionalizing more people who seemed mentally unhinged and potentially violent. The same thing is happening now, for obvious reasons (by various accounts, none of which has been fully substantiated yet, presumed gunman Adam Lanza was unhinged). As Reason’s Jacob Sullum wrote regarding Loughner, even the most vociferous propopents of locking up potential killers grant that maybe 10 percent of schizophrenics become violent. Academic studies of presumptive detention of the mentally ill suggest that mental health professionals do about as well, and sometimes worse, than regular people in figuring out who exactly is going to go postal. Such results should temper any and all calls to start rounding up more people in the name of protecting innocents.

The general decline in gun-related violence and the inability even of mental health professionals to identify future mass killers should be the essential starting points of any serious policy discussion generated by the absolutely horrific slaughter at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. We should also add a third starting point: Few good policies come from rapid responses to deeply felt injuries. Many of the same people who are now calling for immediate action with regard to gun control recognize that The Patriot Act, rushed through Congress in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, was a terrible piece of legislation that ultimately did nothing to protect Americans even as it vastly expanded the state’s ability to surveil law-abiding citizens. There’s no reason to think that federal, state, or local gun control laws promulgated now would result in anything different.

If hard cases make bad laws, it’s even more true that rare crimes make terrible public policy.

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If hard cases make bad laws, it’s even more true that rare crimes make terrible public policy.

Not if you ask That One’s buddy Rahm! Remember, massacres are an opportunity to push policies that you wouldn’t be able to get away with otherwise. (What, did you think the libs were going to suddenly start caring about the destruction of human life?)

At the start of a second term and facing a terrible economic situation (much of it due to his own policies) and an equally awful foreign-policy situation, it’s plausible that Obama will turn to gun control as a way reconnecting with his liberal base and as an attempt to soothe the nation. At a press conference about the shooting, the president said, “We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.”

A decent president, alas, would not have jumped into making hay by being a carrion-consuming political vulture. He’d have just expressed his sincere condolences to the parents and all loved-ones, in the name of his family, and the country he’s supposed to lead.

Acknowledging the horror of what happened and mourning for innocent lives snuffed out and families destroyed by the incomprehensible act of a madman is precisely what the country should be doing right now. If it seems as if that is a passive non-reaction, that’s because too many people understand what mourning entails. After that can come a policy battle that can be fought with passion but not with emotionalism and ignorance of relevant, basic facts standing in for rational analysis and honest debate.

…and not by making political hay, from Obama on down, not hours after such a travesty, caused by a sick young man.

To Hades with all politicians who did, and with all commenters, from the media to the ones here. May Bloomberg and Obama lead you there.

-rights, in the plural…see Libya, Egypt, Syria and a bunch more. The Arab ‘Spring’ is a disaster. Slavery flourishes in Egypt and women have no right. He is silent and Hillary slips on an imaginary banana peel.

Yet, they pontificate to the world. To Hell with both of you and all who follow you.

Any psychiatric nurse will tell you that the percentage is far higher – and will have the scars and bite marks to prove it.

The policy of deinstitutionalizing schizophrenics and treating them on an outpatient basis hasn’t worked well overall. Schizophrenics who exhibit violent tendencies should be institutionalized for their own good and for the good of their families and society.

It’s so sad when tragedies like this school shooting are used for political points. Cripes, can these useful idiots wait a few days at least? All the gun control in the world wouldn’t stop this kind of madness…ask Norway.

Let’s let the investigation get going and try to find what it was that drove this young man to do the unthinkable…at this point, everything is speculative.

Spread this around – your enemies are clueless or intentionally ignorant and obtuse.

Schadenfreude on December 16, 2012 at 1:50 PM

Look, I’m no fan of Obama or the congressional Left…but to insinuate that it’s somehow their fault because funds were cut is absolutely ludicrous. That’s something I’d expect a liberal to say about a GOP POTUS, not from our side. I like to think we have much more class.

This school just recently added a whole new security system, including locked doors after 9:30 am. You’d need to be buzzed in after that with cameras around the place. So they had current and supposedly effective security in place…maybe the next step is bullet-proof glass.

Charles C. W. Cooke, writing in the National Review’s Corner blog this morning, had this thought:

Herein lies the essential problem for those who would radically change our constitutional order: Americans know that they could never do such things whether they had no guns or two hundred guns at their disposal. The mind of a man so ill or depraved that he is capable of an atrocity such as we saw at Newtown is not one that can be constrained by law. Nobody refrains from shooting up a school because it is illegal.

Indeed. I could hand the average person a loaded Thompson machine gun with the 150-round cylindrical clip (think Machine Gun Kelly), point to the nearest school and say, “Go over there and have at it,” and no one is going to do that. The gun does not make people crazy and shoot up schools; crazy people get guns (illegally if necessary) and shoot up schools.

For anyone who thinks guns can be totally eliminated, consider Prohibition. Now increase that violence by a few orders of magnitude. I’d think gun-running into the US might just be a bit more profitable than sneaking rum in from the Bahamas — it’s be another War on Drugs. Insanity.

This problem is about the current decay of our society with the absolute morons, the prezuhdunce being first on the list, who are running this country into the ground. I read that the shooter at Fashion Island yesterday lives in his car. How many more people are or will be living their cars because they can’t pay rent or mortgage to live in an apartment or home? How many people are struggling, barely getting by, scraping for a living while Louie and Marie live it up in the WretchedHive, planning their latest ostentatious overly-expensive vacation on the backs of the American taxpayers while the witchy FLOTUS has the nerve to complain about voter suppression and fraud, which clearly came from her side, and then to add further insult by calling others liars. The angry grumpy FLOTUS should know cuz she’s a pretty good liar herself and she’s married to an even better liar. I’d hate to be them if our society really crumbles cuz the nuts and the downtrodden will probably head straight for DC.